were there. The Catholics, whom by an old inherited instinct Grattan
professed to dread, were the most Conservative part of the population,
so Conservative as to be unaware of the source of their miseries,
without the smallest leaning towards a counter-ascendancy, and without a
notion of sedition or rebellion. Paradox as it seems, if they leaned in
any political direction, it was dimly towards the constituted authority
of the day, the Irish Parliament. But the truth is that they were
without political consciousness, behind the times, unappreciative of the
new forces operating round them. In sore need of courageous and
enlightened guidance from men of their own faith, they were almost
leaderless. The leeway to be made up after the destructive action of the
penal laws was so enormous that Catholic philanthropists had no time or
will for high politics, and devoted their whole energy to the further
relaxation of those laws, to the education of their backward
co-religionists, and to the mitigation of poverty. For relief they
instinctively looked towards the only legal source of relief, though the
source of secular oppression, Parliament. But this was habit. The
Catholics at this time were like clay in the hands of the potter, open
to any curative and ennobling impulse. That impulse came, as was right
and natural, from the Protestant side. The only healthy political
organization in Ireland in 1782 was that of the Volunteers of the North,
with their headquarters at Belfast. They represented all that was best
in the Protestant population. They had won the practical victory, such
as it was, Parliament, with all its flaming rhetoric, only the titular
victory. They grasped the essential truth that Parliament was rotten,
and that Ireland's future depended on its reform. Numbering some 80,000
or 100,000, they at once began to press for reform, and, since they had
no constitutional resources, to overawe Parliament. Parliament at once
stood on its dignity and on its civil rights against the "Pretorian
bands." "And now," said Grattan in his magnificent way, "having given a